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Suppose that a group of people are crazy enough to try to create the "Amiga of 2024". How would that computer be like to be as revolutionary as the original Ami

Suppose that a group of people are crazy enough to try to create the "Amiga of 2024". How would that computer be like to be as revolutionary as the original Amiga was back in the day? Would that be kind of like a XBOX X/PS5 with a keyboard and no DRM?

guenthert 3y ago
Hard to tell. In the early eighties, home computers were starkly limited by hardware. Truly just crude machines only kids and nerds could love. It's hard to overemphasize how breathtakingly impressive the Amiga was on release. Today personal computers application are chiefly limited by developers' and users' imagination.
beschizza 3y ago
It would have a custom GPU that will remain conspiciously better than anything available for less than $1000 for three years. You could imagine an in-house "NVidia game console" that does this, perhaps? But surely a terrible business plan for whatever it has in its technology pipeline.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  It would have to be extremely better too, or people wouldn't notice the difference. Socially computing has changed so much, with mobile and everything, so it's hard to imagine what a spiritual successor to an Amiga would be today. It was also very simple to understand and well documented, and small and responsive. I think if a computer was made today where everything was treated with the utmost care for latency, that could make a difference. Imagine a user interface which had effectively zero latency, and no loading times at all.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > It would have to be extremely better too You see these things happening today with things like the Apple VR headset and its custom real-time compute co-processor. VR requires a kind of low-latency operation that was par for the course w/ home computers, including the Amiga itself (partly because analog CRT displays were themselves very low latency compared to current garden-variety LCD's) but is seen as very high-end today.
zozbot234 3y ago
A fully documented RISC-V based manycore system (plus standardized extensions for graphics and DSP, probably leveraging "V" compute support) that's roughly as compact and powerful as the Mac Studio is today, but selling for a fraction of the price. That's actually not that far-off as a goal, the issue is that the software ecosystem today is very different from what it was like back then. The Amiga had no equivalent to today's AAA games or apps, pretty much everything was "indie" by current standards. So DevX and openness were key considerations that would actually make a difference to the commercial success of a platform. RISC-V today is popular with academics but has yet to see any kind of real adoption.

guenthert 3y ago

Hard to tell. In the early eighties, home computers were starkly limited by hardware. Truly just crude machines only kids and nerds could love. It's hard to overemphasize how breathtakingly impressive the Amiga was on release. Today personal computers application are chiefly limited by developers' and users' imagination.

beschizza 3y ago

It would have a custom GPU that will remain conspiciously better than anything available for less than $1000 for three years. You could imagine an in-house "NVidia game console" that does this, perhaps? But surely a terrible business plan for whatever it has in its technology pipeline.

actionfromafar 3y ago
It would have to be extremely better too, or people wouldn't notice the difference. Socially computing has changed so much, with mobile and everything, so it's hard to imagine what a spiritual successor to an Amiga would be today. It was also very simple to understand and well documented, and small and responsive. I think if a computer was made today where everything was treated with the utmost care for latency, that could make a difference. Imagine a user interface which had effectively zero latency, and no loading times at all.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > It would have to be extremely better too You see these things happening today with things like the Apple VR headset and its custom real-time compute co-processor. VR requires a kind of low-latency operation that was par for the course w/ home computers, including the Amiga itself (partly because analog CRT displays were themselves very low latency compared to current garden-variety LCD's) but is seen as very high-end today.

zozbot234 3y ago

A fully documented RISC-V based manycore system (plus standardized extensions for graphics and DSP, probably leveraging "V" compute support) that's roughly as compact and powerful as the Mac Studio is today, but selling for a fraction of the price. That's actually not that far-off as a goal, the issue is that the software ecosystem today is very different from what it was like back then. The Amiga had no equivalent to today's AAA games or apps, pretty much everything was "indie" by current standards. So DevX and openness were key considerations that would actually make a difference to the commercial success of a platform. RISC-V today is popular with academics but has yet to see any kind of real adoption.